


The Fall of the Trickster

by Grac3



Series: Loki and the Doctor [4]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Boys Kissing, Gen, Minor Violence, Post-Thor (2011), Spoilers for Episode: s01e09 The Empty Child, Spoilers for Episode: s01e10 The Doctor Dances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-03
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-09-28 02:18:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10065980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grac3/pseuds/Grac3
Summary: The Doctor, Rose and Jack are bored out of their minds and can't decide where to go next; the TARDIS decides to take over, sending them to the location of a set of coordinates that the Doctor has had for a very long time.





	1. This Left Feels Right

There was a lull on the TARDIS. Such things weren't uncommon – much to the Doctor's irritation – but it couldn't be all flying around time and space and getting shot at by whichever alien race they had managed to piss off that day. Sometimes the adventures just… stopped. There was rarely any rhyme or reason to it; it just sort of happened.

That's what had happened that day.

The TARDIS was in flight, somewhere in deep space, only using enough energy to stop it from being pulled off somewhere dangerous by the gravity of some large celestial object as it floated peacefully passed them all. Its three passengers were sitting around in the control room, all pre-occupied with solitary activities, leaving the ship was in an almost eerie silence.

Jack was sitting on the sofa next to the control panel, fiddling with some kind of 51st Century technological gadget – he had informed them all that it was meant to be a communications device, but Rose had laughed at that and told him that if that was what passed for mobile phones in the 51st Century, then they should never have been allowed to leave the 1980s.

Rose was leaning against the railings, her arms folded over her stomach and her eyes glazed over as she stared into space, the sound track of her introspection being the occasional sparks, clunks and Gallifreyan profanity coming from the long pair of legs sticking out from underneath the grating.

The Doctor was… well, neither of them were entirely sure exactly what the Doctor had been doing for the last hour and a half, but he was working on something with the sonic screwdriver, and so they had decided that it was perhaps best to just leave him alone to get on with it; after all, neither of them wanted a repeat of the time when Jack had snuck up on the Doctor with a feather duster while the Time Lord was trying to reconfigure some settings on the scanner, and he had very nearly ended up depositing the ship into a volcano. And so, as always, the Doctor's occupation was the first to end.

It began with a faint burning smell – so faint that neither Rose nor Jack really noticed it. Yet it grew steadily stronger as the seconds passed, and the buzzing of the sonic screwdriver became more and more frantic.

The change in pitch of the alien instrument was enough to draw Rose from her reverie. She blinked once, returning to reality, and looked down at the Doctor's legs, sticking out from underneath the floor panels.

The appendages were twitching slightly now, as though the Doctor was trying to push himself further into the ship to sort out a wire or a circuit or a fuse that he just couldn't reach.

This strange display lasted for a few moments before a soft, swirling cloud of smoke began to rise from the opening in the grating, like a candle had been lit somewhere directly below it. The Doctor, however, seemed oblivious to that fact, and continued with his tinkering.

An uneasy feeling welled up within Rose. She slowly unfolded her arms and wrapped her hands around the bar of the railing behind her, leaning forward slightly in the hope that her Time Lord companion would be able to hear her better.

"Doctor?" she called warily, yet the only person whose attention she drew was Jack's: the former Time Agent finally looked up from that sad excuse for a mobile and surveyed the scene before him, from the worried Rose and the Doctor's non-listening legs, to the plume of smoke that was growing steadily thicker with each passing second.

Jack put his strange device down on the sofa seat next to him and pushed himself to his feet, his thick boots clunking on the grating as he walked over to the Doctor.

"Doc…" he said warningly, but to as much avail as Rose.

It was now becoming difficult for either of the humans to see the hole in the floor into which the Doctor was half-inserted, for it was almost completely obscured by smoke. Jack looked ready to grab the stubborn alien by the heels and drag him out of there, regardless of what he might have been up to at that very moment, but he was relieved of having to do so when there was a small _puff_ and thick, black smoke flooded out of the hole.

The Doctor emerged quickly, slightly soot-stained on his face and hands as he made a hasty retreat from his workspace, coughing as he waved a hand to clear the cloud that surrounded him. When he had recovered, he looked up to see Rose and Jack glaring at him.

Rose even had her hands on her hips.

"What?" he asked innocently.

"What have you done?" Jack asked impatiently. "Have you blown something up?"

"No!" the Doctor insisted, but neither of his companions looked all that convinced. The Time Lord sighed, tucking the sonic screwdriver into his pocket and pushing himself to his feet. As he turned to the control panel, Jack replaced the square of grating that the Doctor had removed to fit underneath it.

The Doctor was tapping away at buttons on the console as the screen on the scanner flickered. Gallifreyan symbols appeared on the screen and disappeared again almost immediately. The Doctor took them in with his fast-moving eyes, the smile melting slowly off of his face as he read.

It did not go unnoticed by Rose.

"What is it?" she asked, moving around the control panel to stand next to the Doctor, but she couldn't understand the alien script.

"Nothing," the Doctor replied quickly, with a shake of his head.

It was a terrible lie.

" _Doctor_ ," Rose snapped, in the tone of voice that made her feel as though she was the Time Lord's mother and he was a child refusing to go to bed. She was still glaring at the Doctor when she felt Jack stand just behind her.

" _I_ haven't done anything," the Doctor explained. "The TARDIS has."

"And what has the TARDIS done?" Jack asked impatiently, crossing his arms over his chest.

A dark look crossed the Doctor's face momentarily – so swiftly that if you blinked, you would miss it. It did not go unnoticed by Rose, who felt a sense of unease at the sight of it.

It was known to all on board the TARDIS – but entirely unspoken – that the Doctor wasn't entirely happy that Jack was travelling with them. Up to their trip to 1941, the dynamic on the ship had remained mostly unchanged since Rose had agreed to join the Doctor on his travels. There had been the brief period when Adam had joined them, but after the incident with the boy genius nearly messing up the entire timeline of the universe, both the Doctor and Rose had decided that his inclusion on the TARDIS had been a bad idea.

Jack, on the other hand, hadn't done anything quite as devastating as that. Granted, he had tried to con the two of them and had nearly killed all of East London before the Second World War had even ended, but since he had come aboard the TARDIS, he had mellowed.

Somewhat.

He had certainly never tried to con them again, and early-1940s London had never been safer – except for the bombs, that was.

Even so, his presence and the rising of the population aboard the time ship from two to three (or three to four, depending on if you counted the TARDIS itself as a sentient being, which the Doctor always insisted upon, but Rose remained sceptical about) had never particularly sat well with the Doctor.

He never said anything outright – though the double-meanings in his words towards the ex-Time Agent sometimes forced Rose to suppress a wince – but it was obvious that there were times, not necessarily all the time (but definitely some of the time), when the Doctor resented having Jack with them. It wasn't as though the two of them didn't get on, or even that they had any ill feelings towards each other at all; but there was still a rivalry between them that Rose didn't fully understand: a rivalry that always seemed to reach an uncomfortable peak whenever Jack said or did something that the Doctor took as an attempt to assert a superior level of authority.

"The TARDIS," the Doctor began, his voice hard as he swerved on Jack; he turned to Rose and his expression softened, "has turned off the Odyssey Facilitators. She wasn't happy with me tinkering."

"Well, can't you turn them back on again?" Rose asked, waving her hand ambiguously at the panel. Surely there was a button or a lever or a widget or a gadget on there that would override the TARDIS' decision – whatever that decision, in fact, entailed.

"I can't," the Doctor replied gruffly, shooting a brief look towards the now blank scanner. "Have to wait for the TARDIS to calm down and turn them back on herself."

"But until then, we're stuck here?" Jack asked, disbelieving and indignant. He leaned forward slightly, his arms still folded over his chest.

"No," the Doctor told him. "The Odyssey Facilitators can't be turned completely off. There's a safety mechanism which prevents it, so that if any danger befalls the TARDIS and we need to get away quickly, we can. But when they're off, that's all we have: one journey. Then we have to wait for them to turn back on."

There was a brief silence that followed the Doctor's words as they sank in, until it was broken by Jack.

"So where do you wanna go?" he asked, unfolding his arms and looking from the Doctor to Rose.

Feeling slightly ganged up on – as the Doctor turned to face her as well – Rose stammered slightly, not quite sure who to look at. Jack had an eager look on his face, obviously desperate to go off somewhere and have an adventure. It had been a while since they had properly done something other than just sitting around in the TARDIS as the ship floated through deep space, and she was rather looking forward to the next time that they would be somewhere else and actually _doing_ something – even if that something didn't involve saving an oppressed alien race on some far-flung planet.

But then she looked over at the Doctor, and he had that dark and shadowed look on his face that he wore when he thought that someone was going to make a bad decision that he might not be able to rectify.

"Uh…" she hummed. "Is it such a good idea to waste our one trip? I mean, we might need it."

"We're in the middle of nowhere!" Jack exclaimed impatiently, turning fully towards her. "Nothing's gonna attack us out here, and we don't know how long it'll be before the Facilitators turn back on. What are we supposed to do until then?"

"You could always go to the library," the Doctor said in a mock-cheerful tone of voice, prompting a scowl from Jack.

Rose could see that a compromise would need to be reached, lest she end up the reluctant referee in another one of the Doctor and Jack's bitch fights.

"Well… how about we go somewhere we know is safe? Like the Eye of Orion, or-"

They were cut off by the familiar sound of the TARDIS taking off: the loud groaning and wheezing that filled the entire ship as the time rotors in the central cylinder that ran upwards from the console began to move up and down.

"What's going on?" Jack asked tentatively.

The Doctor turned back to the screen, tapping away furiously as though trying to override some command.

"The TARDIS is sending us somewhere," the Time Lord explained. "She's obviously got plans for our one trip."

"Well, where are we going?" Rose asked, her voice a dark almost reminiscent of her mother. She crossed the space between her and the Doctor to stand at his side, looking up at the screen and the string of numbers and letters written upon it.

"There," the Doctor answered, pointing at the screen.

Jack took his place on the other side of Rose, gazing upon the screen.

"That's on the other side of the galaxy," he noted, looking over at the Doctor. "What even _is_ there?"

"I don't know," the Doctor admitted, "but I know who we'll find there."

The Time Lord reached into the inside pocket of his leather jacket, retrieving a piece of paper that had a line of red handwriting upon its yellowing surface. The characters had almost faded away, but as he angled the paper towards Rose and Jack, they could still make out enough of what was written there to know that it was the same line of numbers and letters that was on the TARDIS' screen.

"I've had this for a while," the Doctor explained.

"I think that might be underestimating it a bit," Jack commented, but the Doctor ignored him, instead looking Rose straight in the eyes.

"Loki gave it to me."

Rose's eyes widened as Jack's brow furrowed.

"Loki?" the ex-Time Agent asked.

"Prince of Asgard," the Doctor answered. "We've met him before," he added, gesturing to Rose with a slight nod of his head.

"He was in prison," Rose told Jack.

"But he wasn't when he gave me these," the Doctor interrupted, tucking the paper with the coordinates on it inside his pocket again.

The familiar wheezing sound of the TARDIS being in flight began to die down as they landed… _somewhere_.

"Well, where does he want you to go?" Jack asked, as the Doctor turned and headed for the door. Rose followed quickly, practically on his heels.

"Dunno," the Time Lord admitted. "Those coordinates aren't on Asgard, though they're closer to Asgard than they are to Earth. Then again, knowing Loki, we could be anywhere."

The Doctor wrenched the door to the TARDIS open, and made to take a step outside.

"Doctor!" Rose screamed, as the Time Lord's foot found no purchase and he nearly fell out of the ship. Rose grabbed his arm and steadied herself by holding on to the doorframe as the Doctor half-hung out of the TARDIS, one arm flapping uselessly as he tried to right himself again. With a strong pull, Rose yanked the Doctor back into the TARDIS, earning a grateful nod as the Doctor looked out on where they had arrived.

If it had not been for the fact that the TARDIS had made the whole song and dance about the fact that they were definitely in flight, Rose thought that she wouldn't have believed that they had moved at all: the black- and blankness of space still stretched out before them, as far as the eye could see, not punctuated by any kind of star or planet for millions of light years.

"Where are we?" Rose asked, stepping back slightly from the doorway.

"I have no idea," the Doctor mumbled, looking out of the door from the left to the right and back.

"Why would Loki want us to come to the middle of nowhere?" Rose wondered aloud.

The Doctor didn't reply, now half-hanging out of the door – with one hand gripping the doorframe so that he didn't fall out – still searching the emptiness of the space outside the ship for some clue as to why the trickster would have wanted them to come here.

It was only when he looked up that he finally realised.

There was something – a single, solitary body – in the vast nothingness of this area of space, which was gently floating towards them.

"You've got to be kidding me," the Doctor sighed, reaching out his hand for the body as it got closer and closer.

"What is it?" Rose asked, but her question was ignored.

A few moments later, Loki's hand was within the Doctor's reach. He grabbed hold of it and pulled the trickster inside the ship, setting him up on his feet.

He looked a lot younger than he had the last time that Rose had seen him, with shorter hair that appeared to have been taken greater care of, and instead of a rather every-day and Earth-like outfit, he was wearing what was obviously the height of Asgardian finery: gorgeous greens and golds and blacks with long, flowing materials and shiny, metallic finishes.

But for all the strength that his attire suggested, the man himself did not appear nearly as stable.

His skin was as white as a sheet, in stark contrast with his dark hair. He appeared to be quite thin – though he had always been quite thin – and his cheekbones were almost visible in a way that didn't seem entirely healthy.

His eyes were closed when the Doctor pulled him inside the TARDIS, but they slowly fluttered open when he seemed to realise that he was no longer floating in emptiness. Their usual bright green was dull and hazy, glazed over as if they hadn't seen anything other than blackness for longer than Rose cared to think about.

They flickered slightly as his eyes fell on the man standing before him, a shot of recognition flashing through them.

"Doctor?" he croaked, his voice barely louder than a whisper, before his eyes rolled back into his head and his knees gave way underneath him.

The Doctor caught him by the arms before he collapsed fully to the ground, but it was perfectly clear that he was no longer conscious – and possibly wouldn't be for a while.

From somewhere near the control panel, Jack sighed.

"Why do pretty boys never collapse into _my_ arms like that?"


	2. These Days

When Loki awoke, he couldn't remember having fallen asleep. Up to this point, he had believed it impossible to fall asleep in the Void, to escape the endless nothingness – even by falling unconscious. He was sure that he had been awake the entire time since he had fallen from the Bifrost; granted, he couldn't remember every moment that had passed – however many moments there in fact had been since that awful, horrible day – but he was sure that he had been conscious of every single one as they happened.

The perpetual state of half-awareness that he had been in since he had let go of Gungnir had brought back a vague memory, one of a prison – the perfect prison – from which one could not escape, not even by dying…

"Doctor! I think he's waking up!"

The voice – that of a maiden – was harsh against his ears, so sensitive after having spent so long in the deafening silence.

As his awareness gradually returned, his senses began to detect other things: the warmth of the air around him, when before, there had been no air to have any kind of temperature at all; that he was lying on something soft that supported his weight, rather than _nothing_ through which he could only fall; that, for the first time since this nightmare began, he could actually _move_ – he didn't have the oppressive blankness of the Void pressing in on him from all sides, suffocating him and locking all of his limbs in place, leaving him completely immobile and with no hope of escape.

His brow furrowed slightly as he was drawn from his slumber, and the sounds around him – a shuffling of feet and a shuffling of clothes: the sounds of _life_ – cleared around him, becoming less and less muffled with each second that passed.

Then the voice – the maiden's voice – was speaking again, this time to him.

"Loki? Can you hear me?"

_Yes, I can hear you, but who are you?_

Loki dragged his eyes open, only for them to be assaulted with _yellow_.

He was aware that the room he was in was white, that bright, colourless nothingness draining all emotions from the walls, leaving them blank canvases for the thoughts and feelings of those who stood within them. But the colour above him was a bright yellow, the same yellow that the sun shone at midday on Asgard-

No. Don't think of Asgard. For thoughts of that place – all wrapped up in gold to hide the filth that lay within – threatened to send him into a dark place, one darker even than the Void…

His vision was still too blurry to work out what the yellow was. He blinked furiously, trying to clear it, but nothing seemed to work properly. The edges became more defined, but everything else was still too slightly out of focus for him to properly distinguish.

He still wasn't entirely able to make out certain details, when suddenly, something touched him.

It wasn't a harsh touch: it was gentle and tentative, but it was unexpected and he didn't want it, so he shoved the hand away from his face and scrambled into a sitting position, holding his sheet up to his chest as he tried to sit as far away from the yellow maiden as he could get on the bed on which he had woken up.

The sudden movement brought the clarity back to his vision, and he could see the maiden's face crease in confusion and hurt.

"Loki, it's me."

Loki shook his head at her, wanting nothing more than to get away from here – from _her_ – but here was safe, here was not the Void, and how could he ever leave somewhere that was not the Void ever again?

"I don't know who you are," Loki told the maiden, and it was only half a lie. He didn't _know_ her, but he recognised her; somewhere in the jumble of memories that was his confused mind, he remembered seeing her: a picture of her.

But he didn't know who she was.

The maiden rose from the stool on which she had been sitting, beside his bed.

"Loki, it's me: Rose. We met, remember? When you were in-"

"Rose."

An authoritative tone cut across Rose's speech mid-sentence. They both turned towards the door, off to Loki's right and behind Rose, to see a man with close-cropped hair and a leather jacket standing in the doorway, his arms folded over his chest and a dark, warning look on his face.

"Doctor, what's going on?" Rose asked, as the Doctor crossed the room to stand beside her. "Why doesn't he remember me? What's wrong with him?"

 _What's wrong with me?_ Loki asked bitterly in his head. _I am a Frost Giant, a Jotun, a monster; the monster parents tell their children about at night…_

The Doctor reached up to the wall above Loki's head, and suddenly there was a beeping from behind the trickster.

Loki jumped at the noise, twisting around on the bed and looking up to see a screen mounted on the wall, still clutching the sheet to his chest. The Doctor pressed at points on the screen, and each time he made contact with it, a beep sounded from it and the features on the screen changed. The screen was covered with strange, swirling symbols that Loki wondered was the Doctor's native language – the language of Gallifrey.

"He can remember," the Doctor answered simply, "he just can't remember what hasn't happened yet."

The Time Lord pressed the screen twice more, with a distinct air of finality. The screen went blank and he turned back to Rose, who still looked perplexed.

"What do you mean, it hasn't happened yet?" she asked.

"It hasn't happened yet. It has for us, but not for him. We keep meeting out of order."

"But he recognised you."

An awkward silence descended over the two of them, and Loki could practically see the cogs turning in the Time Lord's head. There was only one way that Loki would know the Doctor in this form and not Rose, and that was if he met the Doctor in this form without Rose – but the Doctor hadn't met Loki in this form without Rose, so there must have be a future – his future – where he travelled in this form without Rose.

And the thought of that seemed to send shivers down the Time Lord's spine.

Yet that wasn't the part that intrigued Loki the most. Rose had said that he had recognised the Doctor – but when?

He strained his memory to see beyond the nothingness, to reach beyond his time spent floating in the Void, until…

Until he remembered falling asleep. He remembered being dragged into the TARDIS and set upright; he remembered seeing the face that stood beside him now, and he remembered collapsing, falling away into a more complete, a more beautiful and comforting nothingness than he had remembered experiencing for a long, long time.

And he also remembered a strange beat beneath his palms, just before he had slipped away from reality: a beat with a familiar feel, but an unfamiliar rhythm.

A heartbeat: doubled.

"You have two hearts," Loki gasped, finding his voice breathy and weak. How long had it been since he had spoken?

The comment cut across the silence between the Doctor and Rose, as they both turned to the trickster in the bed.

"Yes," the Doctor nodded briefly, but there was another puzzle in play in his head, the pieces being manoeuvred into position behind his stormy blue eyes. "And you were falling through space."

Those eyes seemed so familiar, the bright blue boring into his soft, green irises. Loki could almost recall having seen their twin pair, somewhere, but the memory was being pushed down into the depths of his mind even as it fought to reach the surface. The only thing that emerged it was the feeling that it produced: the shadow that covered his life up until that awful moment when he was lost, and all the dread that came with being so unable to step out into the light, no matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried…

Loki shied away from the Doctor's gaze, shrinking further into himself as he fixed his gaze on the sheet covering his legs.

 _Pathetic,_ a voice that sounded suspiciously like Odin hissed in his head. _Is that any way for a king to behave?_

 _I never wanted to be a king!_ he shouted back, but the sense of inferiority only grew until he was torn from his introspection by the maiden's – Rose's – voice.

"Loki?" The name came as a question, tentative and as though she was walking on eggshells around him. "Loki, what happened to you?"

If he had the strength, he would have laughed – or at least chuckled. So much had happened to him in the last few days since Thor's failed coronation.

The coronation that he had ruined.

But surely he had been right to do that – Thor wasn't ready, and the warrior with the deep green eyes had made that all too clear to him. Granted, things had got out of hand, but things had only really started to go wrong for him – Loki – when he had found out the truth.

It was only then that he had lost himself, and he hadn't even been afforded the time to recover when Odin had the selfishness to fall asleep and force his adopted son into the one position that he was completely unequipped to hold. Loki had never wanted to rule, and – as a consequence – he simply didn't know how to do it. The pressure weighed heavily on his already fractured mind, until it had broken completely and he had turned on his own race.

So, what had happened to him? If Rose wanted to know, then she would have her answer.

"Jötunheim," he murmured, his voice barely louder than a whisper. He didn't turn to the maiden whom he was addressing as he spoke; instead, he kept his gaze firmly fixed on the sheet covering him.

"What about it?" Rose asked softly, keeping her distance. Loki was grateful that she didn't try to touch him again.

Glossing over the fact that Rose seemed to know what Jötunheim was – after all, it had been made perfectly clear that she would met the trickster at some point in his future – he sighed, closing his eyes briefly as the thought of what he had attempted to do returned to him with a vengeance, accompanied with all of the guilt that such an action deserved.

"I tried to destroy it," he admitted.

A sober silence followed the confession, and – now that it was out in the open – Loki found himself wondering why he was bearing his heart and soul to someone he had only just met. Regardless of whether or not she knew him in his own personal future, Rose was still – to him – a complete stranger, and generally he did not make a point of confessing the heinous crimes that he had committed to complete strangers.

Then again, Rose was a companion of the Doctor's, and – at the moment – the Doctor was probably the one person in the entire universe who really _knew_ him, and so if he couldn't trust the Doctor's companion, then he couldn't really trust anyone.

"Your home planet?" Rose asked, her voice laced with disbelief and wariness: a combination that only revealed her fear.

Well, why shouldn't she be scared?

Loki turned to her quickly at her words, not for the tone, but for the comment: she knew. She knew his true heritage and the horror of his actions.

Yet she was still there – she wasn't running away, like everyone should from Frost Giants. If anything, she merely seemed sympathetic.

Loki risked a glance over at the Doctor, to try and gauge his reaction: it was not something that the trickster could bear to look upon for too long.

Those eyes – which he now realised were so much like Thor's that it sent daggers of guilt and longing plunging through the core of Loki's very soul – had clouded over, like the Asgardian sky when his brother's ( _no, not his brother_ ) anger was inspired.

It suddenly dawned on Loki that the Doctor had never told him what had happened to _his_ home planet – what had happened to Gallifrey. Surely it hadn't been destroyed? And certainly not by the Doctor's hand?

Yet Rose gave the Doctor a sidelong glance, almost as if she was checking that the Doctor was okay in such treacherous conversational territory, and it dawned on Loki just why, all those years ago, the Doctor had looked so sad at the mention of Gallifrey.

Loki's sympathy, however, was short-lived, and his newfound anger must have been evident in his expression, for the next moment, the Doctor was sending Rose out.

"You've got to be kidding me," Rose scoffed, glaring up at the Doctor.

"I need to speak with Loki alone."

"Why, cause this is a touchy subject? It was a touchy subject last time, but I was allowed-"

"He hasn't met you yet!" the Doctor snapped, a desperate edge to his tone as he begged Rose to understand. "Last time was in Loki's future, he was different. People change. Believe me, if you'd met me a couple of hundred years ago, our relationship would be completely different."

A silence followed the Doctor's words – long, drawn-out and agonising – before Rose finally agreed to move away. She headed for the door on the wall opposite the foot of Loki's bed, and disappeared into whatever lay beyond. The Doctor watched her go, only turning away from the door when it had swung shut. Even then, he couldn't quite seem to be able to meet the trickster's eyes.

"Loki-" be began, but Loki cut him off.

"You knew?" he asked, lacing his voice with as much spite as he possibly could.

The Doctor sighed. "I've always known."

Loki had been getting used to this intense feeling of betrayal ever since he, Thor, Sif and the Warriors Three had been on Jötunheim after the botched coronation, and his skin had first developed that awful blue tinge.

It was at that moment that he had realised that everyone he had ever cared about had been lying to him. Well, maybe not Thor – he probably hadn't known, or he wouldn't have spent their entire lives speaking of how he longed to see all of the Frost Giants dead at his feet.

Yet none of that meant that it hurt no less now than it had when he had forced Odin to tell him the whole story in the weapons vault. For some reason – and he hadn't exactly known why – he had sort of had the feeling that the Doctor would never lie to him.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he whispered, his entire body beginning to shake with exhaustion, both emotional and physical; however long he had been unconscious after the Doctor had recovered him from the Void clearly hadn't been long enough for him to recover from that time spent in nothingness.

The Doctor pursed his lips before speaking. "The first two times I met you, you already knew. Then I met you a third time, and you didn't. Then the fourth time, you did. But I never found out when you found out. Whenever I see you, I have to work under the assumption that you don't know yet, otherwise your timeline will be damaged."

"What's wrong with a damaged timeline?"

The Doctor let out a humourless breath of laughter and ran his hand over his short-cropped hair. "You don't want to know."

Suddenly, a loud bell rang throughout the room, and the Doctor snapped his head up to face the ceiling.

"What was that?" Loki asked, a sense of trepidation growing at the Doctor's obvious wariness.

The Doctor offered him no answer, nor did he get time to, for the door to the infirmary burst open almost immediately after the sound rang, and Rose – who had probably been waiting just outside the door for the last few minutes – rushed over to the Doctor's side.

"What's going on?" she breathed, though no sooner had the words left her lips than they were joined by another: a man whom Loki recognised from the older Doctor's photos, wearing a simple pair of black trousers and a white t-shirt over his muscular frame.

"Are we in danger, Doc?" the man queried of the Time Lord, and – for a third time – the Doctor didn't get to answer, for the man who had spoken with a similar accent to that of Jane Foster all of a sudden seemed to notice the figure in the bed, and his previous expression of concern, alertness and determination was replaced with one of the most beautiful smiles that Loki had ever seen.

"Why, hello there," the man grinned, pushing himself between the Doctor and Rose and extending a hand towards the trickster. "Captain Jack Harkness; I don't believe we've met."

"Now's not the time, Jack," the Doctor warned, as a small smile broke out on Rose's face, and Loki shook the offered hand rather nervously.

"So later, then?" Jack asked, in a tone of voice that put Loki in mind of Amy, though it was certainly more effective in its endeavours. The question was accompanied with a wink that somehow sent shivers down the trickster's spine.

"No," the Doctor growled, dragging Jack away from the bed and towards the door. He paused slightly to look back over at Loki. "You coming?"

Loki blinked, slightly surprised that he was being invited on… whatever this was, and nodded, throwing the sheet off of him and twisting so that he could get out of the bed.

As he followed the Doctor, he fell into step with Rose, who had stayed behind to wait for him.

"Don't worry about Jack," she assured him, "he does that to everyone."


	3. Slippery When Wet

It was a familiar feeling, being walked through the corridors of the TARDIS, even though the interior of the ship looked completely different than the last time Loki had seen more than just a glimpse of the control room through the open doors. This version of the ship was all deep yellows and oranges, though it didn't have the same warm feeling that the older Doctor's TARDIS had had, for the glass finishes had been replaced with metal; and it was incredibly different from the stone interior of the younger Doctor's TARDIS…

They reached the control room within a few minutes – a brown effort with strange markings on the sloping walls and metal grating underfoot – where lights were flashing throughout the room and a screen attached to the central console was displaying mauve letters in the same script that had been on the screen above Loki's bed in the infirmary.

The Doctor was already at the console, working away at the screen with Jack hovering close behind him. When she and Loki reached the door to the control room, Rose rushed to the Doctor's side, leaving Loki to stand back somewhat awkwardly by the door.

He was only there for a few seconds, however, before the ship jerked violently and he was thrown forward onto the floor. He managed to catch himself before he broke his nose on the metal grating, but it cut painfully into his palms as he splayed them to stop his fall. Looking up from his supine position, he saw that the three travellers had all stumbled, but been able to stay upright – though Rose only managed to do so by holding on to the side of the control panel for dear life.

"What's going on?" Jack asked as Loki righted himself. The ship was still moving around, and the trickster had to walk slowly over to the control panel so that he would remain upright.

"We're being hijacked," the Doctor growled angrily. "Someone's dragging the TARDIS with an electromagnet."

No sooner had those words left the Doctor's mouth than the jerky movements of the ship stopped with a definitive metallic _clang_. All of the lights in the control room dimmed, and the screen flickered off. There was a moment of silence before the control room was filled with a long, pained whine of machinery.

Even in the dim light, Loki could see the fear that filled the Doctor's eyes at that sound. The Time Lord rushed from the control panel to the wall, pressing his palms and his ear up against it, as though the TARDIS was whispering secrets to him.

"No, no, no!" he exclaimed, pushing himself away from the wall and running over to a different panel on the console. Loki, Rose and Jack rushed around to see what the Doctor was looking at: a radiation gauge with the needle pointing to 'critical', and the ninth light in a row of twenty-four next to the gauge which was flashing.

"Iota radiation?" Jack asked, a hint of worry in his voice.

The Doctor nodded grimly. "Harmless to anything organic, but to TARDISes…" He glanced forlornly upwards as the ship gave another distraught moan. "It's coming from outside."

"Then let's go," Rose offered, but the Doctor shook his head as he turned to her.

"The Odyssey Facilitators are still off. We're not going anywhere."

Loki watched the exchange from Rose's side, wondering if traveling with the Doctor usually held perils such as this. If it did, then he found it hard to believe that the Doctor would ever reach 1000, let alone exceed it.

"What shall we do?" the trickster asked, drawing the Time Lord's attention. The Doctor turned to him, determination etched into his features.

"Go outside."

"What?" Jack exclaimed, his voice rife with indignation. "Are you insane?"

"Yes," the Doctor told him simply, flashing him a goofy grin. "Also, we've just been brought here by someone who has access to an extremely powerful electromagnet that's capable of towing the TARDIS. Now, I don't know about you, but I want to meet them."

With that, the Doctor turned from the control panel and marched purposefully towards the door. The other three didn't move immediately, but – silently and unanimously deciding that none of them wanted the Doctor to face an unknown enemy alone – they all followed him.

The world on the other side of the TARDIS was dark, and had the pressing feeling of having been in a perpetual state of night for centuries – possibly even longer. The terrain was rocky and difficult to walk over, with large boulders every few feet blocking the view of much of the surface.

Yet none of them were able to focus much on their surroundings, for it became immediately obvious that – wherever this was – it was not uninhabited.

The TARDIS had been landed in a corridor of sorts between several tall boulders that almost made contact with each other, creating two massive walls on either side of them: walls that were lined with some of the most grotesque creatures that Loki had ever seen.

The creatures were humanoid, if the definition could still be used on such grotesquely mutated being. The skin that was visible underneath their dull metal armour was entirely grey, and their bright metallic eyes glinted in the darkness of their surroundings from their disturbingly skeletal faces. Their bodies were bulky, though only because their armour made them so, and their exposed chests were so thin that their rib cages pressed against the skin covering them.

They were also incredibly fast, for they were on Loki in mere seconds.

The trickster was flanked by two of the creatures almost as soon as he had stepped out of the TARDIS; they grabbed his arms and dragged him away from the others, increasing the distance between him and the TARDIS as he was walked further down the rocky corridor. The Doctor, Rose and Jack tried to get over to him to fight the creatures off of him, but they were held back themselves by three more of the horrible creatures. As the three of them realised that their struggling was futile, the two creatures dragging Loki threw him unceremoniously to the ground.

Loki suppressed a pained grunt as he collided with the rocks, seeing close-up that they had a purple tinge to them, almost as if they were faintly glowing – almost as if they were radioactive.

"Leave him alone!" Rose shouted across the fifty or so feet that now separated her from Loki; the trickster suddenly became very eager to find out just what had happened between them in her past and his future.

Loki tried to push himself to his feet, but one of the creatures stamped its foot on his back, holding him in place. He was merely grateful that his head was angled so that he could still see the three travellers.

"You are of no importance to us. You may leave: but the Silvertongue stays with us."

The voice was harsh and raspy, coming from somewhere above Loki's head. It had an authoritative undertone, and he knew immediately that this person the leader: all of the other creatures were, at best, foot soldiers.

"What makes you think we'll leave him here?" the Doctor asked, struggling once more against the creature that was holding his hands behind his back, to no avail.

"We have heard of you, Doctor," the voice said. "We know your name and we know your history. You will leave him."

The figure that was speaking suddenly entered Loki's field of vision, walking over to the three travellers so that Loki could see it. It seemed to be of the same species as the other creatures, though it was wearing a long cloak with a hood that must have covered most of its face. In its hand it was holding a large metal sceptre, the gold from which it was made curling over a glowing blue gem that was set into the top of the staff. The sight of it sent a shiver of fear down Loki's spine.

"And what if I refuse?" the trickster called over to the creature, effectively catching its attention. It turned swiftly to him, its features invisible in the shadow that his hood created. It looked down at him for a few seconds, contemplating, before it nodded almost imperceptibly at the creature holding him down.

Loki was suddenly flipped over, his back slamming into the rocks more violently than his front had when he had been pushed, winding him for long enough for that creature to make its way over to him and lean down into his face, snarling at him.

"You will stay, Silvertongue," it rasped, its breath clouding in Loki's face and making him cough. "You may be the one who killed King Laufey and attempted to destroy Jötunheim, but you are not the big, bad wolf that you think you are. With the Other, and with the Chitauri, you could be so much more."

The creature – whom Loki assumed was the Other – brought the sceptre with its glowing gem into Loki's field of vision. Even looking at it this closely had a noticeable and entirely unwelcome effect on his mind; he could feel it being moulded and reshaped, love and compassion being replaced with the purest forms of hatred and ambition.

From underneath the hood, Loki could see the corner of the Other's mouth twitch upwards in a cruel smirk as he drew the sceptre down his body, from his head to his chest. With every inch that it gained on his heart, Loki could feel the organ battering itself against his ribcage as though its efforts could end the twisting of his consciousness, as it was encroached upon by a darkness more complete than that of the Void could ever be…

Until, from within the overpowering loathing of everything in the whole of Creation – and nothing did he hate more than his own useless, worthless existence – he was saved from being completely drowned in the gem's influence by a voice cutting through the air from the other side of the rocky corridor.

"What do you want with him?"

The smirk melted away from the Other's lips, replaced with a scowl as he stood up from Loki's supine form. The effect of the sceptre and its eerie gem was ripped from the trickster's mind like hairs pulled from a scalp, leaving him disorientated on the ground as he gasped violently in the quest for oxygen. Dots appeared at the edges of his vision, each disappearing as soon as they appeared, only completely leaving when his coughs finally subsided. He let his head loll to the side, so that he could watch the exchange between the Other and the Doctor.

"He will lead us," the Other replied simply.

"Why him?" the Doctor parried. "You said it yourself, he's not all he's cracked up to be, so why settle for him? You could have much more competent leaders. The Sontarans, the Slitheen-"

The Other stamped his sceptre on the ground in a gesture like Odin with Gungnir. The sound of metal striking rock reverberated throughout the corridor, echoing off of the rocks.

"The Silvertongue is the only one who can get us what we need. He may be a _Jotun runt_ , but he was raised as an Æsir, and a prince nonetheless. He knows about the Tesseract. He can retrieve it for us."

Loki almost didn't register the task that was being imposed upon him, for those two words that had ruined his life having slipped so easily from the Other's lips – though laced with disgust, as it rightfully should be – was threatening to send him to a new level of hopelessness and despair such as he had never once experienced before he had stood in the weapons room holding the Casket of Winters. Had he been the only one in the entire universe who had not known of his true heritage?

As his thoughts raced faster and faster within his head, the gem within the sceptre began to glow ever brighter. The shine seemed to catch the Other's attention, for he chuckled slightly and turned back to the (former) prince on the ground.

"Oh, yes," he purred, his voice low as he took a step closer to Loki, though he remained upright himself. "We know you, Loki of Jötunheim. Odin may have used his magic to hide your true form, but – as your brother so rightly observed – Æsir magic and science are the same thing, and your concealment is nothing more than a perception filter."

The Other reached out his hand towards Loki, curling his fingers in on themselves. The temperature all of a sudden dropped dramatically, but Loki found that he was not bothered by it. It was a feeling he was familiar with, and – as he glanced down at his hands – his fears were realised.

The Æsir skin melted away from him, replaced with the horrible cerulean that he had been conditioned his entire life to despise. The blue crawled up his arms and disappeared beneath his clothes, reaching further up his body until the world became brighter and more focused, and he knew that his eyes were now shining a deep crimson, their usual green completely eradicated.

The Other chuckled, a deep sound resonating from the depths of his chest, hard and sinister and grating on Loki's nerves.

It enraged the trickster.

Loki pushed himself to his feet, a quiet voice in his mind telling him that his rage was the product of him being in his true form – for Æsir would never have such unrighteous anger as this – though he ignored it just as he ignored the fascinated looks on the faces of the Doctor, Rose and Jack. He reminded himself that it wasn't fascination at all: it was disgust and repulsion, the only emotions that were worthy of use when one was witnessing the atrocity that was a Frost Giant.

He regarded the Other with cool detachment, the fury veiled beneath his words. "You did not answer my question," he began smoothly. "What if I refuse?"

The Other's reaction was slow. From underneath the hood, Loki could see his lips curl into a sinister smile, a terrifying eagerness and mischief lifting their corners. He raised his free hand to Loki once more, in a fist, and carefully extended his fingers outwards.

The uncomfortable coldness slowly melted away from Loki's body, as the blue slid from his skin, replaced with its usual pale complexion. The terrifying clarity that Jotun vision gave him disappeared and, when he was back to his normal self, the Other lowered his hand.

Then, in a lightning-fast move, the Other flicked the sceptre behind him, sending a burst of powerful, blue energy out across the rocky corridor. Loki barely had enough time to register what was happening before a scream filled the empty air, and a body crumpled to the ground.

"Rose!"

The Doctor's agony filled his voice as the Chitauri holding him and Jack released them following a subtle hand gesture from the Other. They both dropped to their knees, the Doctor pulling Rose's unconscious form up so that her head was resting against his leg. Loki ran towards them – slightly surprised that neither the Other nor any of the Chitauri tried to stop him – dropping to all fours on the other side of the prone maiden.

He had only just met her, and she had been so kind. How could be possibly be responsible for her death?

"She's breathing," Jack sighed, as he looked over Rose. Relief crashed into the trickster like a tidal wave, leaving him feeling lightheaded.

"She won't be for long," the Doctor interjected. "We need to get her on the TARDIS, and we need to get the TARDIS out of here. The iota radiation in the rocks is killing her."

At the Time Lord's words, Loki realised that, from over the other side of the rocky corridor, he hadn't been able to hear the pitiful noises that the TARDIS was making – mechanical moans and groans that, if they had been coming from a person – would have indicated a level of anguish that Loki had no particular desire to imagine, but he was all too aware of the pained sounds coming from the ship now that he was closer to it.

The TARDIS was, indeed, dying.

"But the Odyssey Facilitators -" Jack began, but the Doctor cut him off, reaching into the pocket of his leather jacket and pulling out a silver key: the TARDIS key that Loki had seen the older Doctor with when the ship had crash landed on Asgard. The key was flowing gold rather than retaining its dull silver, the brightest thing for hundreds of millions of miles.

"She turned them back on," the Doctor explained, tucking the key away once more. In his lap, Rose drew in a sharp, rattled breath, and a significant amount of colour drained from her cheeks.

"What are we going to do?" Jack asked desperately, staring at the Doctor, who only had eyes for Rose.

Loki watched the two men carefully: the desperate American wanting nothing more than for his friend to live, and the despairing Time Lord grieving in advance for the woman with whom he had fallen in love, further burdened with the expectation that he should know what to do and how to proceed all of the time, when it was perfectly clear that – at this point – he was at a complete loss.

So Loki made the decision for him.

"You're going to leave me here," he said simply, and the two men looked up abruptly from Rose to stare at him in shock.

"Loki-" the Doctor began.

"You have to get Rose away from here, and they will not let you take me with you. You shan't lose Rose like you lost Grace."

A dark look shot through the Doctor's eyes at the mention of his old love, and Loki found himself wondering if the picture of her was still sitting in its frame on a bookshelf in the library.

Stormy blue eyes locked onto bright green ones, messages being sent silently between them while Jack looked on in ignorance.

"Doc?" he asked, gaining no response. "You're not gonna leave him here, are you?"

A hardened determination set into the Doctor's features, and Jack's eyes widened with realisation.

"Doctor-" he began, but he was ignored.

The Doctor reached into another pocket of his jacket – the thing was practically more pocket than jacket – and pulled out a blank piece of parchment, handing it to Loki. The trickster took it with some confusion.

"It's psychic paper," the Doctor explained. "Says whatever you want it to say, but you can also use it to send messages. I have one as well, and if you ever need me, you let me know and I'll be right there."

Loki tucked the paper away in a pocket of his own, an intense warmth rising within him at the kindness that he was being shown.

"Thank you."

He wasn't afforded the chance to say anything else to the Doctor, for a hand was suddenly placed on the back of his neck and he was brought forward, a pair of lips crashing against his.

The kiss was brief – and oddly enjoyable – but the trickster felt nothing but dumb-striking shock when Jack finally pulled back.

"Be safe," the American told him, and Loki could only nod slightly, finding himself – for the first time in his life – unable to find the right words.

The Doctor shot Jack a disapproving look – to which the American merely replied with a small shrug – before the Time Lord turned back to Loki.

"Until next time," he said.

"Until next time," Loki agreed.

The two men stood up from the ground, the Doctor bundling Rose in his arms as they turned back to the TARDIS, closing the door behind him.

As the ship began to dematerialise, the Other stood before Loki, blocking the trickster's vision of the TARDIS as it finally faded out of sight. "You have made a wise choice, Silvertongue," he informed him.

The Other brought the sceptre down, touching the tip to the trickster's chest – and Loki was unmade.


End file.
